Brendan Scarano

Software Engineer

Web Developer

April 27, 2014

Dev Bootcamp Week 4

If DBC was a roller coaster for the first three weeks filled with ups and downs, week 4 was the first loop you encounter. I will be honest when I say I came into the week expecting the shift to Phase 2, and the web, to be easier than what we were doing in Phase 1. I was wrong — at least in the beginning.

The first week of Phase 2 began putting the pieces of the first 3 weeks together with a great deal of new topics introduced, all to start developing applications we can see and use on the web. The languages and applications we covered this week included:

Javascript

jQuery

HTML/CSS

AJAX

Sinatra

In conjunction with this several new topics were introduced including:

Routing

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous page load

User Authentication

Sessions & Cookies

The material moved fast, and in the beginning in the week, as with most weeks, I found myself struggling with the topics and really understanding how everything interacted with one another. Personally, I found the most challenging concept to be the idea of routing and how web pages send each other information.

By Wednesday evening I took some time to revisit some of the challenges from the previous days and attempt to work on them alone, rather than pairing. By forcing my way through 1-2 of these problems I began to put the logic behind the each of these new concepts together and began understanding the material on a much deeper level. Although I really enjoy pairing and working through the challenges each day with a partner I find at times that working alone really allows me to cement the work I completed with my pair, and I now plan on completing at least one solo exercise each day after hours.

Two other learning guides I utilized throughout the week were Code Academy and CodeWars. I spent some time revisiting Code Academy's jQuery walkthrough to get brushed up on the foundation of how the code is written and began blocking off at least 30-60 minutes each day for CodeWars challenges to continue getting practice with Ruby and JS.

Towards the end of the week we were split into teams to build a flash cards application that allowed us to get more experience in all of the components we covered over the week. As the projects get larger each week, it is becomming more evident just how useful git and Github are and why they are so imperative in keeping everyone's work together.

I thoroughly enjoyed this week's work and there was a special feeling invoked with seeing the code you are writing change the experience on the web page you are building. While the applications were small it felt great to build programs others can test and use.